Share this story The Blackburn Skua was slow, awkward and asked to do two jobs it could not both do well. It has been mocked ever since as one of the Fleet Air Arm’s worst fighters. And yet in the first months of the Second World War this unloved machine scored...
Share this story Nobody ever called the Fairey Barracuda beautiful. With its high shoulder-mounted wing, spindly legs and a clutter of struts and flaps hanging beneath it, the Fleet Air Arm’s torpedo and dive bomber looked like it had been assembled from spare...
Comparte esta historia. La noche del 30 de marzo de 1944, el Mando de Bombarderos de la RAF envió 795 bombarderos pesados a Núremberg. Noventa y seis de ellos nunca regresaron. En una sola noche, en pocas horas sobre Alemania, murieron más de 500 jóvenes aviadores: la peor noche del Mando...
Comparte esta historia En la primavera de 1942, el flamante Avro Lancaster apenas había entrado en guerra cuando el Mando de Bombarderos envió doce de ellos en una misión que rozaba el suicidio: volar a plena luz del día, a baja altura, a mil millas a través de la Europa ocupada para bombardear...
Share this story On the morning of 21 March 1945, twenty de Havilland Mosquitos came in over Copenhagen at rooftop height, so low that Danes on the streets could see the crews’ faces. Their target was the Shellhus — the Gestapo’s headquarters in the...
Comparte esta historia. Algunos aviones se cancelan porque fallan. El Douglas F5D Skylancer se canceló porque era demasiado bueno, llegó demasiado tarde y fue construido por la compañía equivocada. Alcanzó la velocidad supersónica en su primer vuelo, se manejó de maravilla e impresionó a todos los pilotos que...
Share this story On November 6, 1945, an American fighter turned onto final approach to a small escort carrier off California when its engine quit. The pilot did not bail out. He kept coming, touched down, and caught a wire — and in doing so made the first...
Share this story Take an F-16 Fighting Falcon, throw away its wing, and bolt on a vast cranked-arrow delta that nearly doubles its area. Stretch the fuselage, cram in 65 percent more fuel, and hang bombs from twenty-seven stations. What you get flies farther, carries...
Share this story When the Grumman X-29 stunned airshow crowds in the 1980s with wings that swept the wrong way, and again when Russia rolled out the Su-47 Berkut, both were hailed as radical leaps. Neither was first. A German bomber had already flown on forward-swept...
Share this story The most famous British bomber of the Second World War began life as one of its worst. Before the Avro Lancaster hauled bouncing bombs to the Ruhr dams and Tallboys onto the Tirpitz, there was the Avro Manchester — a twin-engine heavy so plagued...
Share this story Three months after Pearl Harbor, two enormous Japanese flying boats lifted off from a lagoon in the Marshall Islands and set course for Hawaii. Their plan was almost absurd: fly nearly 2,000 miles across empty ocean, meet a submarine at a deserted...
Share this story Late in the afternoon of April 18, 1943 — Palm Sunday — a wall of German transport planes crawled north-east across the Mediterranean at wavetop height, so low their propellers kicked spray off the swells. There were about ninety of them,...
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